Tuesday’s black out: It was a result of excess power-GRIDCo

Tuesday’s power blackout that threw some parts of the country in darkness was as a result of excess power supply says the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo).

It said the company’s thermal plants malfunctioned after they received back power supplied to neigbouring Cote d’Ivoire.

“At exactly 2:37 pm there was a major system disturbance following power from Côte d’Ivoire which led to the disruption of all power plants in Ghana,” Mr Jonathan Amoako Baah,  told  JoyNews Prime.

“This happened when we were exporting about 100 Megawatts from the Ghana system to the Côte d’Ivoire system. All of a sudden Côte d’Ivoire lost their lines to Mali which means that there was over-generation in Côte d’Ivoire and they started exporting power to us.

“The power plants in Ghana are sensitive to power fluctuations [and] this led to the shutdown of the thermal plants in Ghana which caused the outage,” he explains.

The power outage affected the Central, Western, Ashanti and Greater Accra regions as well as the Northern parts of the country.

This is,however, not the first time a blackout is hitting the country this year.

On March 13, this year, the country experienced widespread blackouts for the second evening in one week.

It was blamed on a been a system surge in the power grid.

It resulted in a shutdown of bulk supply points at Mallam, Graphic Road among others around 7:20 pm.

The affected areas include Madina, Koforidua, Achimota, Kasoa, North Kaneshie, Cape Coast and other areas.